Stone Clock

by Andrew Bannister

  About the Book

  The Spin is nearing the end of its life.

  Its inhabitants are divided between those who live unknowingly in the relative paradise of one of hundreds of Virtual Realities – vrealities – and those who scrape a living in what remains of the real world.

  The massive servers needed to maintain the vrealities are draining the resources of the Spin. And an escalating, desperate and seemingly futile war has begun between those who tend the servers and those who believe they should be shut down, killing millions. But one amongst these unwitting combatants will discover the real nature of the vrealities – and his role in their fate. From a remote star system, a being has been observing the Spin for several lifetimes. He is Skarbo the Horologist and he is about to die for the very last time. He has come to accept that he will never visit the object of his studies but is coerced into making one last journey. His final destination lies across a war-torn galaxy. And there he will learn of the Spin’s past – and its surprising future …

  Returning to the extraordinarily envisioned artificial planetary cluster called the Spin, Stone Clock is the dazzling new space opera from the acclaimed author of Creation Machine and Iron Gods.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Peace Rift Plateau, Sholntp (vreality)

  Sholntp System (vreality)

  Experiment, Ice Blade Sector, Bubble

  Greater Bowl, Gannff Planet, Mandate (Original), Bubble

  Sholntp (vreality)

  Experiment

  Wall Energy Collective

  Freelance Charter (unnamed), Ice Blade, SCIOR

  Wall Energy Collective

  Brasedl Space, Ex-Mandate, Sphere

  Wall Energy Collective (unavailable)

  Orbiter ‘moon’, Brasedl Sphere

  Sholntp (vreality)

  Shephhat City (vreality)

  Handshake Space (neutral – disputed), Left Hand Stewardship

  Wiits Range (vreality)

  Handshake, Left Hand Stewardship – Independent Penitentiary Co.

  Wiits Harbour (vreality)

  Spin, Outer Rotate

  Town (name unknown)

  Spin, Outer Rotate, Unknown Planet

  Place, Place

  Wall Energy Collective

  Unknown

  Peace Rift Plateau, Sholntp (vreality)

  Coda

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Andrew Bannister

  Copyright

  Stone Clock

  A Novel of the Spin

  Andrew Bannister

  To Lara

  THE SPIN: EIGHTY-EIGHT planets and twenty-one suns, ancient, artificial and inscrutable, following the impossible orbits set out for them by their makers.

  The unknown architects of the Spin have been gone for millions of years, leaving their masterwork to thrive – or perish. Its diminished people struggle on, watching the shadows lengthen, and escaping when they can.

  And hundreds of light-years away, from within the Bubble of known space, for almost nine lifetimes, an old, lonely creature has been watching, and wondering.

  But so have I.

  Peace Rift Plateau, Sholntp (vreality)

  THEY MADE LOVE on a deep bed of living moss on a flat rock on the Forward Peak of the Prow Formation – an impossibly slender projection of tufa that stuck out a hundred metres over the sheer drop of the Peace Rift.

  Hels had grinned and turned around before she straddled him. She was in determinedly basic Human form, and the view of her body from this perspective should have been enthralling, should have gone straight to his hind-brain without bothering with a hundred million years of humanity as a higher species.

  It was – fine, yes, he had to admit. She looked great. Primitive. Animal, even, and maybe just a bit disgusting, not that he had any problem with that. And it felt good. Not great, but certainly good.

  It was just that she was in the way. He had to keep reminding himself not to twist to one side to see past her.

  The Peace Rift was roughly square in cross-section, about two kilometres deep and the same wide. It was different in every way from the surrounding high country. It was tropical where the High was cool temperate; it was exotic where the High was uniform; it was vividly colourful where the palette of the High was all about muted blue and green and grey – heathers and blunt grasses and, close to the edge, a few tens of metres of soft, thick rust-coloured moss that lived in the warm, damp, slightly radioactive draught that rose from the Rift.

  Hels was getting into her stride. He shoved his hips upwards and gave her an encouraging moan.

  The Rift was the result of a very final attempt to end a war. He had never really decided whether it had been a success or not. Certainly it had ended the war, so in simple terms it had worked. In memory, too; after all, even a hundred thousand local years later it was still called the Peace Rift – even when everyone had forgotten everything else about it including the fact of the war itself.

  That was one of his main reasons for visiting the place when he could. To remember. After all, he had watched it happen – watched the flaming ships fall.

  Watched. He backed away from the word caused.

  Something was peaking. He cleared his mind and arched upwards to match the urgent movements.

  This was his hundredth visit, now he thought of it. He tried to come here about once in a thousand years, local. First, because he had promised, but then increasingly because he had quietly fallen in love with the place. He loved its bones – the unchanging parts – and he loved the changes that came to their covering during his thousand-year absences. He always told himself it had nothing to do with being addicted, because someone had to believe that and it might as well be him. Anyway, guilt was a good enough reason.

  Speaking of coming, focus …

  They orgasmed at the same time. He was rather proud of himself. Pretty good management, considering he hadn’t really been concentrating.

  Hels finished shuddering and collapsed forwards so her head was between his feet. The movement raised her hips, unplugging her from his body. ‘Whoof! Not so bad.’ She swivelled her head round. ‘You?’

  ‘Yeah. It was fine.’

  ‘Fine?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Are you actually awake, Zeb?’

  He thought fast. ‘Sorry. I went pretty far away, just then. In a good way.’

  ‘You must have.’ She rolled off him and landed leaning on her elbow, her face close to his. ‘Sometimes I’m not sure I have your whole attention, you know?’

  ‘Really?’ He studied her face. Smudged by recent passion, but questioning eyes. Rather to his surprise, his body seemed ready to answer the question. He sat up, took her by the shoulders and gently pushed her backwards until she rolled over on her bottom and landed on her back. He let himself fall into the junction of her body.

  ‘Zeb! Mmm …’

  That was better. Oh yes.

  Now there was nothing to interrupt the view.

  Hels moaned. At least part of this visit was going fine. For a while he actually managed to forget the scenery.

  The road train lumbered down the unpaved track at a steady two hundred klicks, its fat tyres drumming and crunching on compacted gravel, pinging over the sharper rocks and squashing shallow grooves in the long stretches of grass that filled the spaces between the patches where the road had been maintained.

  The road train had been built since his last visit. It was another of those superficial changes that made him smile. It, and the whole trip, had been Hels’s idea. He had only been in the vreality a couple of hours, tops, when he had met her, and within another hour he had decided that she
would be more than satisfactory company during his stay – and that she was in charge of herself enough not to take any harm from it.

  ‘You have to see the Rift,’ she had said.

  ‘Rift?’

  ‘The Peace Rift. Do you really not know it? Oh, it’s beautiful up there.’ She studied his face for a moment. ‘And quiet.’

  He had smiled at the implicit suggestion, and allowed himself to be shepherded as if he had never been there before – as if no one had ever insisted that he had to see it; usually within the first hour of meeting them.

  Now they were on their way back down, heading to some party in a place he really hadn’t visited before, for the good reason that it hadn’t been there before. The green-grey landscape swayed past the window. They were off the plateau, and through the thick belt of evergreens that encircled the rising ground like a tonsure. Now they were in grain country – millions of hectares of variously seeded, variably edible grasses that had been grown since the prehistory of the planet. Originally they had been grown for food; now they were just grown. In his current incarnation here, Zeb had read a Planetary Gov paper which reported, in the driest terms, that the risk to health arising from ordinary consumption of grain produced within a hundred kilometres of the Peace Rift – grain that had been bathed in rainfall carrying the slight but undeniable load of radionuclides that wafted from the Rift – amounted to an overall reduction in lifespan of twenty-five days. Out of an average of two hundred and seven years.

  Detectable – and therefore unacceptable. But the grains were still grown. It was about heritage.

  Two days before, and only a day after meeting her, he had watched while Hels had free-climbed a two-hundred-metre rock face. Afterwards, they had both got professionally drunk on home-brewed spirit, renowned – almost celebrated – for its high level of impurities. No one had stopped them, so some self-inflicted dangers were apparently acceptable. They had set off for the journey to the Rift with professional-grade hangovers.

  Probably no one would stop them when they did something similar tonight. Zeb did, and did not, understand.

  The car rocked and threw him against Hels. She stirred and grumbled, then settled back to sleep.

  He wasn’t falling in love, that was for sure. It was his Rule One. Don’t get entangled with the vreal.

  The route down from the Peace Rift to the plains was determinedly rustic. In that, it matched everything on Sholntp. The radiation load of the planet was at maximum, went the logic. So no fissional materials, trans-uranic elements or other nuclear malarkey could be allowed. It was animal power, renewable energy, or nothing.

  In this case it was renewable energy, but as long as he kept the windows closed the smoke couldn’t make him cough.

  The road train was made from five power-cars, each with a thrumming alcohol engine mounted beneath it. The alcohol was brewed from the grain that couldn’t be eaten. Zeb assumed that made the exhaust fumes not only smoky, but a bit radioactive as well. The combination of ancient and modern pollution amused him.

  He felt Hels’s head lift from his shoulder. She blinked. ‘Where are we?’

  He glanced out of the window. ‘Off the plateau; about an hour from Hamlet, I’d say.’

  She nodded, and lowered her head to his shoulder again. He shifted himself to try to make a comfortable spot for her.

  More than anyone he had ever met, she could sleep anywhere, on anything. He envied that. More and more, he couldn’t sleep at all, no matter where.

  Yes; his hundredth visit to this vreality. The first visit, a hundred thousand years ago according to the local timeline, had not gone well.

  Never get entangled, indeed.

  Sholntp System (vreality)

  IT HAD BEEN the greatest space fleet ever assembled by the Seven States. Eleven Dreadnoughts, their elderly flanks streaked with the scars of thousands of engagements as mercenaries; as many again Pocket Battleships, hovering nervously with their heavy weapon loads close to overwhelming their engines; fifty cruisers and frigates, and behind them a mixed bag of tankers and behind-lines warehouse units. All hired by the hour, except for the Dreadnoughts – four of those were indentured to the States, with a status somewhat below slavery, and the other seven were hired by the day on rolling contracts that auto-renewed.

  And, of course, a single Glaive Class Carrier – the only reason the whole enterprise had passed anyone’s commercial due diligence. The Death Rattle was somewhere north of twenty thousand years old, but still theatre-relevant out here; bought, not hired, and therefore a major weight on the rubber sheet of the States’ debt for at least a century, if they lasted that long.

  It was a show of force calculated to reduce the opposition to the role of spectator. What was going to happen, it said, was going to happen – and that was that.

  It was Zeb’s first time in this vreality, but fuck it wouldn’t be his last. When people outside asked him why he visited the vreal so often, this just had to be one of the answers. He had chanced on a war; not a little local one, but a proper, great big existential-threat war, and when did you ever get the chance to just plug straight in to that sort of adrenalin?

  Watching from his role in the opposition, he had never felt more alive.

  He leaned down so that his mouth was near the grubby mike. ‘Ready?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Let’s go.’

  ‘I’m sure I just said no.’

  ‘You know a better way to die? Right now?’

  There was a pause. Then: ‘Nope. Smug dung-sack meathead mammal-fucker.’

  He grinned. ‘Ship? I love it when you talk dirty.’

  There was no reply, but the bits of the display in front of him that still worked flickered and steadied. Behind him, a faint, troubled saw-tooth hum meant that the main drive had fired up, just once more.

  They had already felt the weight of the Death Rattle’s hand, and that had been a pure accident; they had been manoeuvring casually into position, trying very hard to look like a piece of nothing at all, when the vast ship had carried out a trivial course change. The energy backwash from those ancient, brutish engines had blown the rear half of their tiny craft (only eight metres long – barely even there by Carrier standards) into mist. Most of the bits that mattered had survived, but they were hanging in tatters.

  Speed built slowly – given the state of the drive, quickly was no longer an option – but it built. They were off, and that was that; no going back.

  He focused on the display for a few seconds to let it key to his visual cortex, and then leaned back in the lumpy couch and closed his eyes.

  For a moment nothing happened, and he wondered if yet another of the elderly ship systems had packed up. Then the red-green smudges inside his eyelids cleared and darkened, and the Model began to form. He braced himself.

  The Model always shocked him with its perfection, with its vertiginous scale. It made him want to hang on to something.

  It was better than being there. It was as far from a simple view of space as a multidimensional model of the universe was from a wooden model of a planet orbiting a star. It was like being a god, like being able to focus on a single rock and then to pull back to a panorama of a hundred planets without losing a pixel of resolution.

  No, it was better than being a god. And he didn’t believe in gods.

  You had to wait until the Model was complete; if you tried to mess with it when it wasn’t ready you could end up as an unzipped cloud of data. He sat still.

  Then it was complete, and he was at the same time a soaring bird of prey, an infinitely subtle system of doubly enhanced humanity hovering high above the sparkle of a galaxy – and a lens focusing on the finest grain of the smallest image of the slightest molecule …

  Yes. The Model. That.

  He reckoned on about ten seconds of, basically, psychedelic intellectual conflict before his senses settled down. And he had the buffer of his innate Otherness to rely on. What it must be like for timeline-naturals, h
e didn’t care to imagine.

  Or, more accurately, didn’t care. This time he almost persuaded himself.

  Unbidden, the Model was pulling him in. He let himself fall through the flying layers of false reality until he landed where it wanted him. You were never completely in control of the Model.

  A planet. Temperate zones lying between tropics and polar coolness. Greens and blues and scudding white clouds. Unremarkable.

  Still falling. Into the atmosphere; past the clouds. Down towards a landscape of green and brown, a world of heather and old grasses.

  It looked too anodyne. He raised an eyebrow and did the Model equivalent of turning a little to one side. ‘Is that really it?’

  ‘It really is. Why? Were you expecting something else?’

  ‘Not sure.’ He studied it a little longer. ‘Looks a bit – rural, if you get me. As a launch-pad for galactic conquest.’

  ‘I’m sure plenty of people and machines would take that as the hell of a compliment. This is the most elaborate disguise ever constructed for a planet; even the clouds are story-boarded. And, of course, the Seven States would insist that it isn’t about conquest.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He stared back into the Model. A blotched black-and-cream moon swung between him and the planet. He watched it until it had dropped back out of sight, then blinked the Model out of his vision and sat back in the couch. Briefly, he hoped the pose looked relaxed. Then he laughed to himself. The ship had a million sensory channels; if it pointed even a few of them at his body his physiological state would be as obvious as if he were a child’s text under a searchlight.

  But it would think it natural that he was nervous. There was no reason to assume it could guess why.

  An alarm chimed and the ship said, ‘Look, things are beginning to happen. We’re off. Ready?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  He shut his eyes and sank back in the couch as the acceleration built. The Model re-formed in front of him. They were off – at the beginning of a journey that should end, as far as they were concerned, with the Seven States having turned into Eight States.